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Comment by maneesh | Hacker News Reader

Given that 65% of the world's population [1][2] experiences lactose intolerance post-infancy, maybe this wouldn't be such a bad thing.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lactose_intolerance#Epidemiolo... [2]https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/condition/lactose-intoleran...

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Cheese and butter have very little lactose, and yoghurt has only a quarter of lactose content of milk. In many human populations without lactose tolerance, preparing these was actually a way to consume milk they couldn’t drink directly.

They still do have lactose though. I’m lactose intolerant and even a little butter used for cooking causes me to bloat up and gain 5-10 lbs within 30 minutes.

Some cheeses are supposedly lactose free, but seem to cause the same effects.

That’s highly unusual level of intolerance. A whole cup of butter contains only 0.1 g of lactose, and since cup of butter is 1500-2000 calories, in a typical meal that includes butter you’ll consume much less than that. If you just use 1-3 tsp of butter for frying, and then don’t consume everything you cooked, you’ll be consuming less than 1 milligram of lactose. For comparison, most people with lactose intolerance can consume around 10 grams a day, that is, 10 000x times as much. What you describe looks more like allergy than regular lactose intolerance.

Could it have been that lactose intolerance was developed by the various diets in Asia and not by a natural evolution of humankind universally? Because that's exactly what your second link states - that people from the West are less lactose intolerant compared to people from the East.

Lactose intolerance in adulthood is the default for most/all mammals. There is some subset of humans who grew to depend on drinking milk from cows who have adapted to continue producing lactase for their entire lives, but this has no spread to all humans.

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